A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940

by Victoria Wilson

  DeMille was following the family tradition. His father was a touring stage actor and playwright, one of the founders of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York; he in fact named the institution and taught there for seven years.

  Few directors were on the scale of Cecil B. DeMille. He was a showman, a master of the spectacle. Gloria Swanson, his greatest star, described DeMille entering the set like Caesar, with assistants following in his wake and everyone silent while he looked at each detail; when he was ready to sit down, a chair carrier was there to put the seat under him as the great director descended.

  DeMille’s demeanor came directly from watching his father’s old friend, partner, and producer, David Belasco, who many believed was the greatest figure in the American theater and who towered over two generations. “To me,” said Mary Pickford, “David Belasco was like the King of England, Julius Caesar and Napoleon rolled into one.”

  DeMille admired Belasco’s handling of actors and his showmanship and made Belasco’s style his own. Like Belasco, DeMille surrounded himself with pomp and glory. There was always a crowd of dignitaries to watch DeMille shoot one of his big scenes; he loved to have an audience as long as they were quiet and paid attention to the work at hand. DeMille even re-created Belasco’s cathedral-like office, where more than a decade before Barbara had been brought by Willard Mack and Belasco had changed her name from Ruby Stevens to Barbara Stanwyck.

  To both Belasco and DeMille, the minute attention to detail was directed toward a single objective: the production. DeMille’s pictures may have been dismissed as lavish blobs of color with streaks of action, but they made millions. Barbara, for the first time in nine years of making pictures, was working with one of the most powerful and successful directors in Hollywood.

  DeMille dressed like a director; he wore puttees and riding boots and western dress with ruby, diamond, or sapphire cuff links and matching tiepin. He was flamboyant, learned to fly in 1917, and, when flying his own plane—a Curtiss “Jenny” with a wingspan of forty-three feet and a top speed of seventy-five miles per hour—wore goggles and leather helmet. In 1919, at the age of thirty-seven, DeMille rented forty acres at the southwest corner of Fairfax and Melrose Avenues with an option to buy at $1,500 an acre and created a flying field there. He bought a number of Curtiss “Jennys” and started Mercury Aviation, the first commercial transport company to carry passengers on scheduled flights to other cities, including San Diego, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco (an eight-hour flight from Los Angeles). Three years and twenty-five thousand passengers later (without an accident), DeMille had to choose between Mercury Aviation and picture making. He sold the airline to Rogers Airport and the planes to the government of Mexico, where they were soon captured by the Zapata revolutionists.

  Barbara and DeMille had worked together during the past couple of years on Lux Radio Theatre. She enjoyed C.B.—he wasn’t corrupt—and he loved her; she was thrilled to be working with him.

  “You certainly knew where his pictures were going or why they were made,” Barbara said of DeMille. He had “a style of his own,” she said. “Something you don’t see too much of.”

  Barbara was devoted to DeMille’s ideals of the theater, despite their being considered old-school; she was loyal to what she called “the ham.”

  DeMille, like Barbara, was a Republican. He’d voted for Roosevelt in 1932 “for one reason,” he said. “Prohibition.” It was Herbert Hoover whom DeMille still held in the highest “esteem for his sheer brain power and his dogged, uncompromising, selfless honesty.” DeMille didn’t like “the Jewish people” in Los Angeles, though he would remind himself that he “was one of them.”

  • • •

  Barbara had played midwestern farm women, New England factory girls, Park Avenue society women, business owners, prisoners, con artists, missionaries, mistresses, generals’ daughters, gamblers, wives, mothers, and sluts. She’d been in one Western as Annie Oakley, the best sharpshooter of the American West, and loved the freedom of the role. She’d loved Westerns as a child, had read countless books on the country’s pioneers, and wanted to play a real frontier woman, “not one of those crinoline-covered things you see in most westerns,” she said. “I’m with the boys. I want to go where the boys go.”

  Cecil B. DeMille, master showman who dressed and acted it; DeMille Drive, Los Angeles, circa 1936. “When you have a hundred electricians and a thousand extras waiting,” said DeMille of moviemaking, “it’s no time to begin worrying about the story. There’s a devil on your back and he’s riding with whip and spurs.” (PHOTOFEST)

  • • •

  The building of the transcontinental railroad had been a dream of giants, and Cecil B. DeMille’s re-creation of it would be almost as heroic a spectacle.

  The United States was less than one hundred years old when the first transcontinental railroad was built. The country had been held together, North and South, with the winning of the Civil War, and the transcontinental railroad connected its coasts, East and West, and bound the country together.

  It took fifteen thousand mostly Irish laborers—the size of the Civil War armies—to build the Union Pacific with picks, shovels, and mule-drawn scrapers, from the outer edges of civilization through prairie, desert, and mountains of wilderness.

  At work DeMille was never without a finder around his neck. Like his parents, DeMille had been a stage actor; he made his debut at the age of nineteen and was in six Broadway productions, including To Have and to Hold, Hamlet, and his brother’s semi-biographical The Warrens of Virginia, based loosely on the capture during the Civil War of their grandfather by the enemy. In it, Cecil appeared with Mary Pickford, then known as Gladys Smith. DeMille toured as an actor from Florida to Alaska and never lost the actor’s flair; when directing, he performed for those on the set. All eyes were to be on DeMille; he didn’t tolerate any competition from his actors or his crew.

  Union Pacific, 1939. Left to right: Joel McCrea as troubleshooter Jeff Butler; Barbara as Mollie Monahan, postmistress at “end of track”; Robert Preston as Dick Allen, agitator. “A lot of actors thought he was hammy,” McCrea said of DeMille, “but they were hammy actors so they shouldn’t have worried about it. And Coop [Gary Cooper] wasn’t hammy. He liked the old man and I did too.” (PHOTOFEST)

  “You are here to please me,” DeMille said to his crew. “Nothing else matters.”

  • • •

  Barbara was playing Mollie Monahan, the postmistress—the daughter of the Union Pacific’s first engineer—who handles the Union Pacific mail at “end of track” and is the eyes and tongue for Irish immigrants who hadn’t learned to read or write. Mollie belongs to the railroad, though with her orneriness and fight she acts as if the railroad belongs to her.

  DeMille had originally wanted Claudette Colbert for the part of Mollie, but Colbert turned down the role.

  He had wanted Gary Cooper for the part of Jeff Butler, the heroic troubleshooter sent from Washington to help keep law and order along the right-of-way. DeMille loved Cooper; he was DeMille’s favorite actor. He’d just directed him in The Plainsman. Cooper had too many commitments with Goldwyn and Warner Bros. and wasn’t available for the picture. He told DeMille, “Get McFee,” Joel McCrea, the poor man’s Gary Cooper.

  DeMille had known McCrea socially. As a boy, McCrea had visited the DeMille family regularly, going to Sunday suppers there. DeMille had hoped McCrea would marry his daughter Cecilia. McCrea had attended his daughters’ school, a girls’ school; the only boy other than McCrea there was the grandson of Harriet Beecher Stowe. DeMille’s brother, William, sent his daughters, Agnes and Margaret, to the school, as did Louis B. Mayer his daughters, Irene and Edith. (DeMille himself had gone to a girls’ school. When DeMille was eleven, his father died, and his mother, to support the family, turned the DeMille house into a girls’ school. One of the students was Evelyn Nesbit, sent there by Stanford White to separate the sixteen-year-old from Jack Barrymore and other admirers. Nesbit describ
ed Cecil as a “pie-faced mutt.” DeMille went to the Henry C. De Mille School for Girls for four years and at fifteen was sent to a military academy. To help his mother with expenses, DeMille rode the ninety miles to the Pennsylvania Military College on bicycle—clothes, equipment, and all, strapped on the back—his mother accompanying him on her own bike. It was at military school that DeMille’s passion for detail, order, self-discipline, and physical fitness, instilled by his father’s teachings, took shape and where the artist versus military regimentation was first played out.)

  • • •

  A treatment of Union Pacific was written for Fredric March, Joel McCrea, and Irene Dunne. Charles Bickford was cast as the gambler/saloon owner who was to bring drink, women, and trouble to the end of track and delay the Union Pacific’s progress. Bickford dropped out of the picture because he didn’t like the part and was replaced by J. Carrol Naish, who dropped out as well, because of a scheduling conflict. Brian Donlevy was hired for the job.

  DeMille could be dictatorial. He had his quirks, but he was loyal to those who worked with him. He gave work to silent-screen actors long after their prime. He would give his crew hell and berate them if they made trouble or joked around when he was directing, but he invariably hired them back.

  “If there were 500 people up on a mountain,” said Barbara, “Mr. DeMille knew who the hell each one was. He could hear the train long before he could hear the whistle.”

  • • •

  John Ford had made a triumphant epic in 1924—almost fifteen years earlier—about the building of the transcontinental railroad. It was the biggest picture Fox had ever made.

  To make The Iron Horse, Ford had set up a base of operations in the Nevada wilderness. Five thousand extras played the Irish and Chinese railroad laborers; a regiment of the U.S. Cavalry was brought in; eight hundred Pawnee, Sioux, and Cheyenne Indians were used. A hundred cooks were needed to feed the vast army of people involved in the making of the picture. “The actors arrived wearing summer clothes,” said Ford. They lived and worked through blizzards with temperatures twenty degrees below zero; the women lived in circus railroad cars; the men made homes on the sets. Ford worked from a private railroad car hired from the Ringling Brothers. “We had a hell of a time,” he said.

  William Jeffers, center; with (left to right) Governors John Vivian of Colorado, Earl Warren of California, Ronald Sparks of Alabama, Prentice Cooper of Tennessee, 1943. Jeffers taught himself telegraphy and rose through the ranks of the Union Pacific: a dispatcher at nineteen, switchman, yardmaster, trainmaster, and onward. Twenty-eight years later, he was made president of the railroad.

  Union Pacific had a budget of a million dollars. The West was America’s empire, and Cecil B. DeMille was considered as American as Mount Rushmore. DeMille wanted to tell the story as an epic adventure, a “thundering drama” of the men and women who “worked, fought, suffered to make the American dream come true.”

  More often than not, it was said of DeMille that he ignored the facts of history and cared less about character. DeMille’s credo became: “Legend rides the trail with history; truth rides a lonely trail.” It was DeMille’s lonely trail. He was obsessed with historical accuracy and steeped himself in the period before he was ready to go into production. He insisted that every significant episode of Union Pacific was documented despite a popular ditty that said: “Cecil B. DeMille/Much against his will,/Was persuaded to keep Moses,/Out of the War of the Roses.”

  With Holly Barnes and unidentified. (AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING)

  The Union Pacific’s railroad lines went from the banks of the Missouri River at Omaha, through the trackless prairie lands, to the endless reaches of the West and met up with the Central Pacific Railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah, where the tracks were joined and the last tie was laid. With the meeting of the tracks, the two companies, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific, had brought the country together; every city and town in America was linked by railroad and telegraph line. When the last spike was hammered in, church bells rang, fire alarms went off, people cheered passing parades, and thousands knelt in prayer. “The future is coming. And fast,” was the cry.

  The Central Pacific originated in Sacramento. The mostly Chinese laborers laid track, ten miles of it a day, that went eastward across the Sierra Nevada Mountains, fourteen thousand feet high, making a line 1,848 miles through a country that for the most part was uninhabited.

  • • •

  DeMille went to York, Nebraska, to visit the last surviving witness of the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah, in May 1869, which marked the completion of the road and the linking of the continent.

  To make the picture, DeMille enlisted the help of William Jeffers, the president of the Union Pacific Railroad. DeMille thought Jeffers “hardfisted and outspoken,” a man with “a big, heavy frame topped by a face that matched it and a cigar clenched in his strong teeth.” Jeffers had started to work at the Union Pacific when he was fourteen and rose to be its president. He lent DeMille the company’s fast track-laying crew to re-create the race between the Union Pacific and its rival, the Central Pacific, and arranged for DeMille to have the use of six locomotives and fifty-five cars, each of 1860–1870 vintage, and a right-of-way of fifteen miles of track, and he made available the railroad’s resources, including the Union Pacific archives.

  Natalie Visart designed the picture’s costumes. Some felt she wasn’t qualified to be a designer, that she was there as a friend of the DeMille family; she’d attended school with DeMille’s daughter Katherine. But Visart and others had designed the clothes for DeMille’s Cleopatra, with Travis Banton designing the costumes for Claudette Colbert. DeMille was a perfectionist; everything had to be just so. Visart would sit with DeMille and try to think of all the things he could possibly say against the design. If he didn’t like something such as a hat or a wrap, she would offer up another. DeMille would put the other hat on a paper doll, and, said Visart, “it would slip the way it does and [DeMille] would poke it one way and another . . . and we’d spend hours poking paper dolls.”

  His office was filled with miniature trains and dollhouse-size sets. DeMille used Mathew Brady photographs to capture the period. He re-created the entire town of Cheyenne, Wyoming, complete with banks, saloons, livery stables, hotels, and railroad station.

  A real trestle was built and weakened at key points, and a full-size locomotive rode through and toppled over like some great wounded dinosaur, hissing steam. DeMille got permission from the Interstate Commerce Commission to run and operate a railroad and had it licensed as a full-fledged railroad company.

  He wanted real Indians, not overweight Cheyenne—“not in my pictures,” he said. Some of the beer-bellied Indians did get through, and ultimately it was a good thing. No sooner did they arrive on location than it started to snow. The cold and wet and mud resulted in an outbreak of the flu. More than five hundred people were down at one time and had to be treated in emergency clinics.

  The British director Arthur Rosson spent almost three weeks overseeing for DeMille a second unit of four hundred on location, first in Iron Springs, Utah, where six miles of railroad track were laid, and then in Oklahoma and the Mojave Desert. Rosson, former stunt actor and screenwriter, had worked as one of DeMille’s associate directors, beginning in 1926 with The King of Kings.

  • • •

  If one wanted to talk with Barbara on the set, Holly Barnes was always there, sitting with her, watching, never excusing herself. As Barbara’s secretary and on-the-set hairdresser, she was described as Barbara’s shadow. Barnes went where Barbara went, regardless of the studio. Holly was making $65 a week with a weekly bonus of $17.50.

  Barbara didn’t have a studio maid; her maid had quit. Holly thought Barbara should have one. All the stars had maids whom they paid for themselves. Holly interviewed various people and recommended Harriett Coray, a longtime friend then working for another actress. Harriett had started as a studio
maid working for Myrna Loy, a job she took on from one of Harriett’s adoptive aunts, who also worked for Loy.

  Harriett Coray was twenty-seven, fair-skinned with straight hair and green eyes. Her mother was part Irish, part black, and passed for white. Her father, a miner who panned for gold, traveled with Harriett’s mother throughout the Southwest after placing Harriett in a convent in St. Louis where she was raised by nuns. When her family relocated to Los Angeles and Harriett graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School, she applied for a job working as a cartoonist with a new artist—Walt Disney—whose company was in Burbank. But Harriett got cold feet and went to work for Myrna Loy. Harriett was married and had a six-year-old girl called Peggy Jean.

  Barbara said to Harriett about the job, “Why don’t you try me?”

  At first Harriett was scared to death of Barbara. Harriett knew how to do her job, but Barbara was businesslike and seemed to have “an aura all her own,” said Harriett. She got Holly to clue her in to the things that Barbara liked, such as tea every afternoon at four o’clock served on big trays brought by uniformed waiters in white coats. Barbara soon put Harriett at ease and made her feel comfortable. Harriett thought Barbara was “the least actress-y of any star” she had known. “It’s too much of an effort for her to put on an act, so she’s simply herself—real—and real means self-reliant.”

  Barbara moved fast, and Harriett had a hard time keeping up with her. No sooner would Harriett say “Miss . . .” than Barbara was out of earshot across the set, which only exasperated Harriett. After a day or two of that, Harriett just yelled, “Missy,” and that stopped Barbara. The name stuck.

  DeMille told Barbara that as Mollie Monahan she could use an Irish brogue. Barbara recalled what had happened with The Plough and the Stars, where mid-picture she was told to drop her Irish accent and was then accused by reviewers of not being able to sustain one. She bet DeMille $50 that she wouldn’t lose her accent during the production.